Page:Vaccination a delusion.djvu/26

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
20
VACCINATION A DELUSION
CHAP I

formerly a Public Vaccinator, is important. He began an inquiry into the alleged injurious effects of vaccination, wit bout believing that they were serious. The outcome of his investigation was startling to him. In his Annual Report for 1893, he says: "In the investigation of a single vaccination period, the fact was revealed that in quite fifty per cent, of all vaccinated in that period (about seventy), the results were abnormal, and, in a large number of these very grave injuries had been inflicted. That the results of the practice are the same elsewhere as in Congleton I have no reason to doubt, for judging from what I have seen of his method of vaccinating, our Public Vaccinator is as careful as it seems possible for a Public Vaccinator to be."

This evidence of Mr. Davidson is especially important, because it reveals the fact that, as I stated some pages back, neither Public Vaccinators nor ordinary medical men usually know anything of the injurious effects of vaccination, except in such individual cases as may occur in their practice, while all around them there may be a mass of evil results which, when systematically investigated, proves as unexpected as it is startling in its amount.

This brief exposition of medical and official misstatements of facts and figures, always in favour of vaccination, might have been largely increased, but it is already sufficient to demonstrate the position I take, which is, that in this matter of Official and Compulsory Vaccination, both doctors and Government officials, however highly placed, however eminent, however honourable, are yet utterly untrustworthy. Beginning in the early years of the century, and continuing to our own times, we find the most gross and palpable blunders in figures—but always on the side of vaccination—and, on the testimony of medical men themselves, a more or less continuous perversion of the official records of vaccinal injury "in order to save vaccination from reproach." Let this always be remembered in any discussion of the question. The facts and figures